John Wynne

Member

Dr John Wynne is an award-winning artist and academic whose diverse, research-led practice includes large-scale sound installations in galleries and public spaces, delicate sculptural works, photographs that produce sound, flying radios and ‘composed documentaries’ that hover on the borders between documentation and abstraction. His massive Installation for 300 speakers, player piano and vacuum cleaner, developed during an AHRC-funded research residency, became the first piece of sound art in the Saatchi collection and won him the 2010 British Composer Award for Sonic Art.

John’s work with endangered languages includes a project with click languages in the Kalahari Desert and another with one of Canada’s indigenous languages, Gitxsanimaax. The fieldwork for the first of these, Hearing Voices, was done in collaboration with linguist Dr Andy Chebanne from the University of Botswana and the resulting 8-channel photography and sound installation showed at the Botswana National Museum, the National Art Gallery of Namibia and at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS in London. His half-hour ‘composed documentary’ for BBC Radio 3 won the Silver Award at the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago. Later, funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project and the Canada Council for the Arts, John worked with linguist Dr Tyler Peterson to record speakers and environmental sounds in and around the Kispiox reserve in British Columbia, leading to a 12-channel installation which showed for 10 months at the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) in Vancouver before travelling to the ‘Ksan Museum in Gitxsan territory. The installation also showed in San Francisco as part of the American Anthropological Association’s annual conference and at the Satellite Gallery in Vancouver, where John co-organised a symposium at MOA entitled On Endangered Languages: Indigeneity, Community and Creative Practice.

John was artist-in-residence for one year, along with photographer Tim Wainwright, at Harefield Hospital, one of the world’s leading centres for heart and lung transplants. This project resulted in a published book and DVD, a 24-channel gallery installation and Hearts, Lungs and Minds, a half-hour commission for BBC Radio.

John is engaged in an ongoing series of site-specific installations using high and low frequencies: his Installation no. 2 was described in Frieze magazine as ‘a complex block of raw vibrational forces, slowly eroded by a sfumato of elusive reverberations, on the frayed edge between abstraction and contingency, between knowledge and experience.’ These gallery works develop ideas John first explored in the theatrical production Andromache, for which he was nominated for a Dora Award for Outstanding Sound Design and Composition.

Nocturnal (2013) was a collaboration with Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan: commissioned by Aldeburgh Music, it was a 11.4 channel installation using a camera obscura to integrate sound and video across two separate spaces.

John has created large-scale multi-speaker installations in public squares: his first was banned by the City Council of Copenhagen for allegedly ‘frightening and confusing the public’, while Response Time in Toronto was described by one critic as ‘an ambient, ghost-like presence’. ??He has created soundtracks for films selected for the London Film Festival, the BBC Short Film Festival, the Whitechapel Open, the European Media Art Festival and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

John has a PhD in Sound Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London and is External Examiner for the BA and MA in Fine Arts at the University of Kent.

2005Hearing Voices, radio piece commissioned by BBC Radio 3. Silver Award, Third Coast Audio Festival, Chicago. Broadcast on BBC 3 in 2004 and 2005, BBC Europe, PBS in the US and during the Deep Wireless Radio Festival in Toronto.

2005Disappearing in the Kalahari, Great Hall, Goldsmiths University and Sounding Out, University of Nottingham

2005Do(n’t) video and sound installation on the BBC Big Screen in Victoria Square, Hull for the Humber Mouth Literary Festival

2005Response Time, public installation in Kitchener City Hall for the Open Ears Festival

Pending‘Hearing Voices: Research and creative practice across cultures and disciplines’, in Language Description and Documentation Issue 12, December 2013. Also includes newly revised app Hearing Voices: Speakers / Languages

2013‘ITU: The Din of Recovery’, in The Art of Immersive Soundscapes, edited by Ellen Waterman and Pauline Minevich, University of Regina Press. Also includes DVD containing ITU, surround sound video by JW and Tim Wainwright

2013‘On Endangered Languages: Indigeneity, Community and Artistic Practice, symposium at the Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver (co-organiser, session chair and presenter)

2013‘Listening to the malfunctioning body’ at It’s Not What You Think: Communicating Medical Materialities, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen

2012Performance lecture for ‘Audible Observatories: Contemporary Art Practices In Conversation With Anthropologies Of Voice And Sound’ at the American Anthropological Association annual conference in San Francisco. Panel with Steven Feld, Rupert Cox, et al

2012‘The Power of Sound and the Sound of Power: Sound in the Transplant Ward’ at Hearing Landscape Critically: Sense, Text, Ideology, University of Oxford

2012‘Risky Practice: Artists in the Transplant Ward’ at Risky Engagements: encounters between science, art and public health, University of Manchester

2011‘Listening to Endangered Languages, Artificial Hearts and Architectural Acoustics’ at the University of Eastern Finland. Public talk at the award ceremony for the soundscape competition for which JW was Head of Jury